


Smaller Than My Memories

by tielan



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Childhood Memories, Community: halfamoon, F/M, Memories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-05
Updated: 2015-02-05
Packaged: 2018-03-10 16:09:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3296543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/pseuds/tielan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mako Mori was born in the rubble of Tokyo with a <i>kaiju</i> and a Jaeger for her midwives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Smaller Than My Memories

**Author's Note:**

> For the halfamoon prompt challenge: Day 1 - Origins.

Mako Mori was born in the rubble of Tokyo.

She has a  _kaiju_ and a Jaeger both for a midwife – the one to end the cocooned existence she has led until then, the other to save her for the future she will inherit.

Do not the headlines say as much?  _Tokyo’s Daughter_ they name her, and so it is. 

And so Mako Mori is born into the new world – given birth and name and being, given hearth and hope and purpose.

Not until she reaches her teens does Mako realise she can no longer remember the width of her father’s smile, the lilt of her mother’s laughter. The price of her becoming is her childhood: all the things of Tanegashima, the memories that populated her life until Tokyo.

Piloting Gipsy Danger with Raleigh Becket changes that.

Now, during the PPDC tour to Japan, she requested time and space from the tours and the crowds and the mad whirl of fame that she never wanted – only revenge for everything the _kaiju_ took from her. And Mako stands in the snow at the gates of her ancestral home and lets the loosened memories wash over her.

Summer sunlight and winter wind. The smell of cooking rice, the scent of sheets and incense, the liquid language of her forbears, the laughter of her playmates. Stretching with her mother in the morning exercises while the birds chattered in the trees outside. Watching her father make swords while J-pop played cheerfully in the background – a slow and foolish artisan work in a world of small, swift technology.

Now she remembers her father’s smile – slow and sweet as he looked at his daughter, the ring of her mother’s amusement: _She has your smile, Masao, and my sense of humour._

Her hands curl into fists in the cold, then loosen as a hand touches hers. He curls his fingers around her hand, his skin still rough with his work on the Wall. “It’s smaller than you remember.”

“Yes,” Mako says, and closes her fingers around him. “Beginnings always are.”


End file.
